The Turing Test of Prose

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

I built my career writing software. I built bridges between business objectives and the systems and operations that support them. I’ve written elegant, maintainable code, and I’ve written trash. You see, I allow myself to fail, sometimes spectacularly, and I’ve learned to do it right.

One thing stands out from the millions of lines of code I’ve reviewed and maintained: you can tell when someone cared. From the names they used that were well thought out, that clarified rather than obscured, to design patterns that guided you forward instead of fighting you at every turn. You can see it in the edge cases they handled before they became catastrophes, tests that proved the intent wasn’t accidental, that someone had imagined the failure and chosen not to look away.

And you could tell just as clearly when they hadn’t. Logic that worked, but only along the happy path. Patches layered over assumptions nobody had documented. Entire systems that functioned, technically, while resisting understanding at every level. Care left artifacts. So did its absence.

Prose is no different.

Readers won’t tell you they’re noticing structure. They won’t say: the sentence rhythm shifted here and I felt it, the delay before that revelation was exactly right, something was withheld and now I’m leaning in. Often, they don’t analyze. They experience.
It doesn’t matter what genre the prose is written for. We consume stories to feel hope, to imagine ourselves stronger, more capable, and braver than what we see in the mirror.

The author’s voice isn’t decoration, it’s selection, and commitment. It’s what connects readers to us, to our characters, and ultimately to themselves. For our part, as composers of prose, choices are the difference between capturing imaginations and reading weather reports. What gets noticed. What gets ignored. What is stated directly and what is allowed to remain implied, to drift, to land later or never, to become the reader’s discovery rather than the writer’s explanation. A strong voice narrows the world. It says: this and not that. This angle, this light, this moment, rather than the ten moments surrounding it.

I am amazed by what Artificial Intelligence can do. New capabilities come to light every day, every hour. Truly, the latest accomplishments are stunning. And yet.

Generated texts tend to broaden. Machines want to include everything, explain, smooth, and complete it. The generated text is coherent. It is readable. It is, in the way of all things, optimized for general approval, anonymous. No one is standing behind those words because standing behind words requires having chosen them over other words you could have chosen, meaning it, and being willing to be wrong about that choice.

AI tends toward even distribution. Clarity early. Resolution quickly. Confusion is avoided where possible. But clarity too early is a kind of loss. Meaning depends on timing, and without timing, prose flattens into information, which is a different thing entirely from experience.

Great writing is not just what is said. Writers who care think in sequence: what does the reader know now, what happens if I delay this, what gains weight if it arrives later rather than sooner. Structure creates tension the way a held breath does. The release matters because the holding came first.

At the sentence level, the difference is unmistakable. Writers who care break rhythm when it matters. They choose specificity over safety, the word that is exactly right over the word that will do. They let a sentence end sooner than expected and let the silence after it carry weight.

What is left out matters as much as what is included. More, sometimes. Omission creates participation. It creates interpretation. It signals trust. It says: I believe you can hold this gap without needing me to fill it. Generated prose fills gaps because, from a statistical perspective, gaps look incomplete. But those gaps are where meaning lives. When everything is said, nothing is discovered. The reader becomes a passenger instead of a collaborator, and something essential drains out of the experience.

The deeper risk of AI-generated text isn’t about artificiality. It’s scaled indifference. Writing produced without anyone standing behind the choices. Over time, that becomes the baseline, and we are worse for it in ways that are difficult to name and easy to feel.

The presence of a tool does not remove responsibility. It clarifies it. Because now the distinction is unavoidable. The tool produces possibilities. The author chooses what is worth keeping. That choice is where care lives.

Readers notice the difference. Not consciously. But they feel the accumulation of choices made on their behalf, choices that didn’t have to be made, decisions that cost something, and they feel the absence of those choices too, the flatness that settles in when prose has been produced rather than written.

Writers don’t pass the Turing test of prose by hiding their tools. They pass it the same way good engineers do: by leaving behind evidence that they cared enough to make decisions that didn’t have to be made, and then lived with them.

The code will tell you they cared. So will the prose.

An AI Experiment

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

I ran an experiment. The results were far more interesting than I could have imagined. I’ve been working with Artificial Intelligence for a number of years, among the early adopters of ChatGPT, and then others as they came around. I used them for all sorts of things, from dinner recipes to inquiries about quantum consciousness. I asked questions, exquisite and complex prompts to work out pieces of .Net code, including JavaScript, Python, design patterns, architecture theory, and even user experience.

At times, the results were intricate in ways I didn’t anticipate; other times, it required a great deal of refactoring to make it compile.

As an author, I used it for research, character development, and plot tactics. I wondered about reader expectations, what techniques were working in the markets, what was overdone, and conversely, underappreciated.

I look at it this way: Artificial Intelligence was present in my workspace. It did not hold the pen.

In the decade since I began authoring in earnest, I’ve written and self-published eight novels. A short story found its way into an anthology published by the Utah chapter of the Horror Writers Association. I created a recording studio in a corner of a spare bedroom where I practiced the art of voice acting. Hundreds of hours were spent reading manuscripts, editing the wave forms, and publishing the audio versions of a number of novels.

In other words, I was a one-person creation studio. I penned the words, I gave them a voice, I edited, perfected, and produced creative artifacts. I marketed them. I stood in the wind, rain, cold, and heat to peddle these wares to fiction and fantasy enthusiasts with all the polish of a professional.

I am aware of how the advancements of technology can affect every aspect of the creative industries. Human innovations exceed earlier predictions in unprecedented ways, and I continue to marvel at the ingenuity, the level of sophistication, and the incredible speed at which progress advances.

Mind-boggling as it appears, platforms can receive a prompt, research the topic, plan, compose, and produce an audio-visual report of their findings. All that labor, hundreds of hours of human labor, reduced to a handful of minutes of automation. I am deeply concerned for the financial future of fellow creatives.

For that matter, there isn’t an occupation that won’t be affected by artificial advancements. These technologies are here, and whether or not we’re prepared for the future, they will not disappear simply because we fear for the future.

So, I conducted an experiment. I downloaded an open-source Text-to-Speech AI model that I discovered, ironically enough, through one of my chat investigations.

It required a small amount of programming to take an entire full-length novel, break it down into chapters, paragraphs, and sentence fragments short enough to work with the model. Then, in a loop, the program I built started at the beginning, fed a bit of text along with a six-second sample of my voice, compiled a data stream, and produced every chapter of my novel as an audio wave file.

Because I am a nerd, I kept track of everything I did to produce an audiobook from the completion of the print version to the distribution platform. All told, roughly speaking, for every minute of listening to one of my stories, I spent just over twenty minutes recording, editing, and producing the audio.

What would take me months of labor, fitting in recording sessions between work, family, and other obligations, I accomplished with a couple of hours spent writing software. In a single night, while I slept, my voice was used by Artificial Intelligence to produce an entire full-length audiobook.

In all honesty, I am unlikely to distribute these files. While undecided, I find myself leaning in this direction because it feels like I’ve lost the artistry, that human-only factor that makes listening an experience. What AI gave me was narration.

Don’t get me wrong, the model included intakes of air at appropriate spots. It inserted nuanced pitch rises and falls that made the narration less artificial. It breathed in all the right places. It felt nothing. The output lacked what great narrators give to their performances. It’s why, when I produce an audiobook, I include the phrase, “written and performed by” along with the title.

In the end, my experiment produced fascinating results. It taught me a ton about what Artificial Intelligence can do. Perhaps, somewhere down the road, I’ll have to repeat and reanalyze. But for now, I think I’ll stick to the performances, as daunting as that sounds. Because narration might fill the silence, but performance earns it.

The Voice of AI

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

Let me be perfectly clear for a moment. As an author, I need your stories. I need you to show me your world, your perspectives, your likes and dislikes. Through your characters, their hopes and dreams bleed into mine. They show me courage beyond what I can muster. I grieve when they are beaten down, my soul stirs when they rise, and I believe in humankind’s goodness when they triumph over evil.

What makes this possible?

Voice.

We’ve heard the term, but do we know what it is? Can it be learned?

I’ve told people countless times that, as authors, we must read as much as we write or we’re doing it all wrong. But why must we read? What do we hope to gain from it? Put differently, if “Voice” cannot be learned, why study masterful writing at all?

Deep reading activates parts of the brain that short-form content never reaches. It builds the capacity for sustained attention, complex inference, and perspective-taking. These are not just reading skills. They are the cognitive foundations of empathy.
Short-form platforms are engineered to exploit dopamine pathways. The swipe, the scroll, and the notification are not passive features. They are deliberate mechanisms designed to disable the reflective mind and activate the compulsive one. We are not distracted; we are being neurologically reshaped away from the capacity for deep, sustained, reflective thinking.

When you sit down to compose, you do not start with a blank page. Before the first sentence is written, a lifetime of experience has been silently organizing itself. What you learn today accumulates into what you write tomorrow.

We are connected, not by stories, but through shared experience expressed through stories. With every word you write, the specific texture of grief you have known enters into my experience. I am enlightened by the particular quality of light in the places you grew up, the arguments you couldn’t win, and the ones you couldn’t forget.

The books you read, loved, and hated, layer by layer, like sediment, created the writer only you can be.

Voice is what happens when that accumulated self meets language under the pressure of meaning something. When you write from that deep place, from that most personal, intimate place in your soul, you are not just expressing yourself. You are contributing to something greater.

Humanity.

Voice requires interiority. It requires a mind and heart capable of going inward, sitting with complexity, tolerating ambiguity long enough to find the precise true thing to say. Fragmented digital consumption actively destroys that capacity. A writer who doesn’t read deeply is not just missing technique. They are losing the neurological equipment that voice runs on.

To write with genuine voice is to be seen, to face unresolved grief, moral ambiguity, and the dusty skeletons hiding in dark recesses of our mind in unguarded moments.

Writers learn early that the safest prose is the most defensible prose. We read the critiques and take them personally. Review stars, or the lack thereof, demoralize us into writing the stories we think will be received well. In short, we homogenize our own writing. Who needs AI when we do that to ourselves in the first place?

But here is the truth the scoffers cannot touch: the reader always knows. They may not be able to articulate it, but they feel the difference between prose that was written from a safe distance and prose that cost the writer something. That cost is what creates the connection. That vulnerability is the mechanism of the shared experience we’ve been describing all along.

Voice is not just what happens when your accumulated self meets language under pressure. It’s what happens when you stop protecting yourself from that pressure.

Artificial intelligence cannot participate in the cosmic exchange. Not because it lacks technique, but because it has no stake in it. It produces language without sending anything into the shared consciousness, because it has nothing to send. AI can lend its strengths. It can help us identify technique, the mechanics of effective prose—how a sentence builds tension, where a paragraph breaks, how diction creates intimacy or distance. It can show us the bones of what masterful writers do. But understanding the bones of a living thing is not the same as being alive.

I say, learn to use AI. Use what it does well. But when you sit down to write, go deeper than technique. Go to that place where your grief lives, where the light of your particular life falls across the page. Write from there. The world is waiting for what only you can contribute.